I hope you enjoyed your first week of deals on PS3 and PS Vita games for our Holiday Essentials Sale. As I mentioned in our previous post, we're bringing you some of the best PlayStation games at great prices to help you stock up for the holidays.

This week we're providing you with 16 awesome action/adventure games along with other essential PlayStation titles. For great prices you can take part in Starhawk`s frenetic space combat and multiplayer battles, relive two of Kojima's most acclaimed titles in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, or bend your mind with the award-winning Journey. In addition, PlayStation Plus delivers an extra special deal this week - we're offering members Retro City Rampage for absolutely nothing. Moreover, Retro City Rampage features Cross-Buy, which means that when you purchase either the PS Vita or PS3 version, you get the other version at no additional cost!As a reminder, you can save 30%-or up to 50% for PlayStation Plus members-on the action-packed lineup this week. On top of the titles below, we'll have a whole new set next week to close out the sale and ring in the New Year. Don't wait, though, because these games will only be on sale for one week-now through 12/30.

It's awesome. Take everything that you love about the NES and the 80's and mash it together in 8bit graphics with a MIDI soundtrack and make it a huge GTA esque environment and you get Retro City Rampage.

In the demo I was walking past a sewer and four mutated turtles and their rat sensei popped out to try to stop me since I was being chased by the cops.

Oh, cool - Retro City Rampage for "free"? That's good. Not sure if it would ever get down to a price I'd be willing to pay, so "free" is the sweet spot! I'm thinking about getting Quest for Booty and Mafia II...

Glad to see Journey and Papo & Yo on sale. Two really unique titles from this year.

The article says that next week should have a lot of stuff for the new year and for the final week of this sale. I hope so. I've only bought Two Worlds 2 and Crazy Taxi so far. I didn't even care to get the free game last week, the massive 18gb Street Fighter game. I can't imagine the install time on 18gb. 7 hours? I'm being totally serious here as it takes 10-14 gigs 3 hours or more to install.

I was hoping for another $5 game this week. Would have been nice to see DNF take that.

Is it just me or does it seem like games install faster when the system does it as part of the + membership? Like if I pull down a 10gb game and try to install it, it takes a massive amount of time; however, if I leave a game downloading or ready to install and turn my system off and let it finish when it does the daily + upload, it finishes in the allotted 2 hour time that I have chosen.

Yup, I've observed this too. It really downloads faster than usual. However, I do have this suspicion that the system doesn't shut off if the download hasn't completed in 2 hours. Sometimes those patches are really huge and can take longer.